Read Online Blackstone's Pursuits by Quintin Jardine - Free Book Online

fitted into my oven at a squeeze, and by the time we had finished the champagne - if you leave a teaspoon in the neck of an opened bottle of fizz, it keeps its fizziness; not many people know that - and opened a bottle of Safeway Chianti, they were ready.
    Watching Prim eat her first pizza for a year was another of those seminal whatnots. She cut the huge thing into segments which she attacked with her fingers, savouring each ripped-off mouthful, smiling all the time, even as she chewed. When she finished, I still had a third of mine to go. She looked across the breakfast bar at me, her eyes huge and appealing. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I give in. Would you like some more, my dear?’
    The Chianti was new and strong. As we reached the end of the bottle, I felt relaxed, uninhibited and very, very ...
    Prim licked the last of the pizza from her fingers and gazed across at me. ‘Remember that poor young policeman today?’
    ‘Who could forget the poor wee bugger? And that effing troll stood in the doorway trying not to hear him? Why d’you ask?’
    ‘It’s just that tonight, when you said what you said to Ross, I thought for a second, I was going to do the same thing as the boy did.’
    ‘I’m almost sorry you didn’t. There have been many firsts in my life today. That would have been yet another.’
    She drained her glass, and reached for another bottle from the rack, but I reached out a hand and stopped her.
    ‘Prim,’ I said, doing my level best to make my eyes outshine anything in the night sky, framed in the kitchen window. ‘I’ve been thinking. How would it be - and this has to be a mutually agreed thing, you understand - if we decided, first of all that our deeply held principles and rules must remain unbroken, but that in all the circumstances, you should regard lunch today as having been our first date, and by the same token, that should regard myself as having been out with you at least twice?’
    Our elbows were on the breakfast bar. I slipped my right hand into hers, as if we were about to arm-wrestle, and pulled her gently towards me. I kissed her, on the lips again, on her full red lips, not at all chastely this time. Her mouth opened, and I felt her tongue flick against my teeth.
    She tasted of the finest sweet wine, delicious, refreshing, making me long for more.
    ‘In all the circumstances,’ she whispered, our foreheads touching lightly, ‘and given the duration of our acquaintance I would say that such an agreement is, at this moment in time, absolutely...’

In which the Earth moves.
    Primavera, Primavera ...’ I moaned her name in the moonlight which flooded down upon us from the belvedere. She leaned over me, kissing my chest, gently biting my nipples, responding to my touch and moving her self against my hands.
    ‘Where have you come from?’ I asked, drawing her down upon me, and throwing the quilt to one side so that I could wallow again in the perfection of her body, in her firm, full, big-nippled breasts, in the amazing narrowness of her waist, in the round curve of her hips, in the flatness of her belly, in the thick nest of wiry blonde hair at her centre, shining and sparkling as she moved in the moonbeam.
    ‘I’ve always been here,’ she said, and she kissed me with her lips of velvet, as I had never been kissed before. ‘I think we’ve both been moving towards each other, all our lives. I believe in destiny. You’re part of mine, I’m part of yours. We were set on a course towards each other.’
    ‘And will we go on together, Springtime and Oz?’
    ‘Who knows? That’s the thing about destiny; you believe in it and let it take you where it will. Right now we’re together, and it’s always the now that counts.’
    I rolled over with Springtime in my arms, burying my face in her. As I flicked my tongue in and out of her navel, she gasped and arched her back. ‘I want you now. I need you now. Come into me now.’
    I placed a finger across her lips. ‘Time enough,’ I